"There is no such crime as a crime of thought: there are only crimes of action." Clarence Darrow, 1917.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Flanagan uses CBC News as a podium; top TORY advisor to P.M. urges the assassination of Julian Assange

Pity poor cyber warrior Julian Assange. Now even Canadian academics want a piece of him! The truly exciting thing about sowing anarchy is that what you tend to reap is a lot more anarchy. A case in point was the spectacle of an upper echelon Tory advisor, live on the CBC News channel counselling the Americans to murder WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange with a cruise missile. One major newspaper, the JERUSALEM POST made his ugly outburst their top story this morning, although they got Tom Flanagan's name wrong.

Tom Flanagan, a top advisor to TORY Prime Minister Stephen Harper, thinks Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WIKILEAKS should be assassinated. This is a screen capture made this morning of the story posted on the JERUSALEM POST website.

The clip of Flanagan venting on CBC News World is available on You Tube and it seems like Canadians all want to see what he had to say. (Here) It's had 117,000 plays today. Incredible! What I found really amusing is that in almost the same breath of air used to denounce Assange, the Calgary based professor admitted he had read the files and found them titillating. As I mentioned in my previous article, an enormous number of Canadians were waiting to pounce on the U.S. State Department files when they appeared on Sunday, but as soon as they didn't find anything to suit their taste, they all turned on the messenger and started bitching. Flanagan happens to be just one of the those ungrateful bastards. Take a pill will ya! The world is not going to stop spinning just because of the leak of these State Department cables. Anyone who pays attention knows that the Chinese are a bigger threat to U.S. commercial, diplomatic, and military communications than WIKILEAKS could ever dream of becoming. When Mr. Flanagan opened his GLOBE & MAIL on November 18th and read that China had tapped the secure flow of Internet traffic for over a quarter of an hour, and downloaded the lot, he didn't council the Yanks to launch a strike at a Chinese data centre. Of course not.

The Chinese have been harvesting higher grade traffic... U.S. military traffic. In fact the Chinese in 2008 pulled a WIKILEAK type stunt of their own - teasing the Americans with a electronic shot across the bow of the U.S. Navy. Seymour Hersh told the incredible story in an article published in the NEW YORKER on November 1. The Chinese, he wrote, had broken secret U.S. naval codes and for several years had been "reading" everything. "A few weeks after Barack Obama's election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts... . The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand." What if the Chinese choose to share their NAVAL harvest with WIKILEAKS? What if they already have? The horror! The horror!

Seymour Hersh revealed how the Chinese military pulled a WIKILEAKS type stunt of their own. They fed the American N.S.A. a big dose of decrypted U.S. naval communcations. Would Prof. Flanagan recommend the White authorize a strike against Chinese military hackers? Read the entire NEW YORKER article here. Flanagan clearly hasn't.

The problem with Mr. Flanagan is simple. Because he's a buddy of the P.M. and has a security clearence, he believes he's well informed. However, having a head full of TORY gossip is far from a healthy view of the world. Julian Assange and the WIKILEAKS furor is a convenient scapegoat for a corrupted political elite which never did and never will, allow its secrets to be exposed.